Recognizing that these dark web ideas are conservative might also help clear up space for people on the left of center who might share some criticisms of political correctness or campus activism without indulging the right-wing implications of these ideas. Many people across the political spectrum recognize that political correctness and its variants are not meaningless terms. It is no surprise that college students often experiment with activist projects that push the boundaries of liberal norms, and the members of the intellectual dark web are not the only people to have worried about the implications of some student rhetoric.

In the 1990s, left and progressive thinkers including Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Edward Said made clear their reservations about certain activist tactics, and articulated positions in line with the same universalist values neoconservatives claimed as their own. Today, magazines like Current Affairs dedicate much of their content to debunking the claims of dark web figures while also addressing the limited effectiveness of “social justice warrior” politics. Treating the beliefs of the dark web as politically conservative views, rather than a sort of transpolitical meta-position — that is to say one critique of political correctness among others, albeit an extreme one — could do much to bring these sorts of left alternatives into the public debate.

Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring.

The non-profit will be a central source of polling, advice on messaging, data targeting, and think-tank research for a ragtag band of right-wingers who are surging all over Europe, in many cases without professional political structures or significant budgets.

Bannon’s ambition is for his organization ultimately to rival the impact of Soros’s Open Society, which has given away $32 billion to largely liberal causes since it was established in 1984.

Over the past year, Bannon has held talks with right-wing groups across the continent from Nigel Farage and members of Marine Le Pen’s Front National (recently renamed Rassemblement National) in the West, to Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the Polish populists in the East.

He envisions a right-wing “supergroup” within the European Parliament that could attract as many as a third of the lawmakers after next May’s Europe-wide elections. A united populist bloc of that size would have the ability to seriously disrupt parliamentary proceedings, potentially granting Bannon huge power within the populist movement.

FilmCritic Hulk: „You can replace the cast of any movie with The Muppets, but you keep one of the human actors. What movie and which human do you keep?“ Ich so: Die üblichen Verdächtigen, aber behalte den Polizisten. (Ich würde gerne die Schlussszene mit 'nem weglaufenden Muppet-Keyser sehen.)

Ein paar Favs aus dem Thread:

„The Matrix, but keep Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith. His annoyance directed towards Muppets would be hilarious. Plus, Kermit as Neo would be perfection.“

A systematic investigation of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in mouse and human cells has discovered that the technique appears to frequently cause extensive mutations and genetic damage that the researchers say wouldn't be detected by existing DNA tests.

"This is the first systematic assessment of unexpected events resulting from CRISPR/Cas9 editing in therapeutically relevant cells," explains geneticist Allan Bradley from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.

There can be no debate with Holocaust deniers. That is a core principle of moderating the AskHistorians subreddit, one of the largest history forums on the internet—and a crucial lesson Mark Zuckerberg seemingly does not understand. Zuckerberg got into hot water on Wednesday when he stated that Facebook wouldn’t necessarily remove Holocaust deniers from its platform because people “get things wrong” and because it’s not always possible to understand the deniers’ intent.

This position fundamentally fails to grasp how Holocaust deniers spread anti-Semitic propaganda, underscoring a flaw in how the purportedly neutral platform thinks it ought to handle particularly odious ideas. Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately. Deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal: to rehabilitate Nazism as an ideology in public discourse by distancing it from the key elements that make it so rightfully reviled—the genocide against Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others.

And now for something completely different - rediscovered unprocessed data of a spider building a net on my balcony. This composite image combines 2800 frames into one (minimum filter). [The] image represents 12 minutes of web building with an image taken every 250 ms using a 12.5 mm lens. The dotted line in the background is a passing airplane.

May 2018 marked the 401st consecutive month in which temperatures exceeded the 20th century average. Climate change, in other words, is not a hypothetical future event — it’s here. We’re living it. And at a major science conference this month, some of the world’s leading climate scientists said it was changing our world in ways beyond what they’d anticipated.

“The red alert is on,” Laurent Fabius, who was president of the 2015 international climate change negotiations in Paris, told an audience last week at the EuroScience Open Forum, Europe’s largest interdisciplinary science meeting. As of 2015, global temperatures had risen about 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “It’s a race against time,” Fabius said, and the political challenge is to avoid acting too late.

A draft of a forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that leaked earlier this year concludes that global temperatures are on track to rise in excess of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by about 2040. The 2015 Paris climate agreement set limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as a sort of stretch goal, with the less ambitious target being 2 degrees Celsius. The IPCC report, which is expected to be released in October, says that even if the pledges made under the Paris agreement are fulfilled, warming will still exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report also says that the differences between the present day and just 0.5 degrees more warming are “substantial increases in extremes,” including hot temperatures, “heavy precipitation events” and extreme droughts.

NYTimes: In India, Summer Heat May Soon Be Literally Unbearable: „a recent analysis of climate trends in several of South Asia’s biggest cities found that if current warming trends continued, by the end of the century, wet bulb temperatures — a measure of heat and humidity that can indicate the point when the body can no longer cool itself — would be so high that people directly exposed for six hours or more would not survive.“

The Guardian: Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map': „'The rate of sea level rise is currently doubling every seven years, and if it were to continue in this manner, Ponzi scheme style, we would have 205 feet of sea level rise by 2095,” he says. “And while I don’t think we are going to get that much water by the end of the century, I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that we could have something like 15 feet by then.' […] The man seated next to me leans over. 'If what he says is even half true', he whispers, 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map.'“

Der einzige Vorteil, wenn man sich das Geschrei in den „sozialen“ Medien anschaut: Rising Seas Could Cause Problems For Internet Infrastructure: „The dense network of cables that make up the Internet is likely to be inundated with saltwater as sea levels rise, a new analysis suggests, putting thousands of miles of critical infrastructure along U.S. coastlines underwater in the next 15 years.“ Immerhin.